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privacy, conflict, and security problems at giant tech companies, a bank-free consumer-finance system could be a very high-risk consumer-finance system.

      The ability of tech companies to know where you live, with whom, and so much else about us may encourage them to make you a loan a bank wouldn't touch. But all of this personal information also gives these companies the power to price financial services based on data stockpiles that differentiate the rich from everyone else. Given that these companies are at least as profit-hungry as banks, will they still make loans to lower-income people once they are sure which of their customers buys high-markup products? Will financing costs go up for even essential financial services because the big-tech company has enough data to charge higher-risk customers instead of cross-subsidizing transactions across the entire customer base? Will artificial intelligence really secure fair lending when it still can't even read the faces of people of color? How will tech companies cross-sell checking accounts and sneakers? That is, might we get a loan from a tech company, but only if we buy the products it produces at prices it demands under terms no federal regulator can control? One former US regulator has observed:

      What if all this power to send us messages combines with the power to hold and manage, transfer, and even create our money?

      Banks are barred from commerce because of manifest conflicts of interest and risks when a lender is also a manufacturer, advertiser, publisher, and retailer. Big-tech platform companies have no such constraints and can thus condition financial-product access on the purchase of other goods or services, alter pricing based on personal financial information or relationships, and otherwise transform financial services with far-reaching inequality impact.

      The first fix is for the Fed to see America as it is, not as it was. Top Fed officials came of age in the 1970s and 1980s when America was among the most equal nations in the world. At that time, monetary-policy theory could rightly assume that aggregate data about income and wealth represented the vast majority of Americans.

      As we will also see, the wealth effect has made markets prone to another risk. Known as “moral hazard,” it occurs when investors take high-risk bets, insouciant in the knowledge that the Fed will always bail them out. It did in 2008 and again in 2020, making financial markets rise ever higher even as unemployment rose to unprecedented heights. The Fed readily admits it doesn't know how to normalize the trillions now on its hands in the wake of all its post-COVID rescues, suggesting very slow normalization should anything like normal ever again be possible. We will see in Chapter 11 how to take the Fed's heavy hand off the market as quickly as possible without overturning the market at the same time.

      And, federal financial regulators should redesign post-crisis regulation so that its burden is borne equitably by all financial companies, especially those companies that offer higher-risk financial products to vulnerable households. This would expand the supply of equality-essential financial services beneath an umbrella of regulation that protects at-risk consumers. It would also ensure that privateering financial companies die by their own hand instead of receiving the trillions of dollars in bailouts proffered during the great financial crisis and again as COVID struck. We'll see how asymmetric regulation creates equality and financial-system risk in Chapter 8, with solutions laid out in Chapter 10. These include new ways to apply like-kind rules to like-kind companies, changes to key rules to increase credit availability for low- and moderate-income (LMI) households, and

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